Next time I tell you someone from Texas should not be president of the United States, please pay attention.

Molly Ivins

I can’t help but think of Ted Haggard and Eddie Long hiding their being gay behind homophobia and religion. If patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, then religion and homophobia are the last refuge of right wing closet cases…

Now I’m not saying but it seems awful hinky with all these accusations and rumors to be holding prayer meetings while trashing gay and lesbian people. Almost like Perry has something to hide.

Texas Governor Rick Perry plans to host a “National Day of Prayer and Fasting” on Saturday, August 6 at Reliant Stadium in Houston, Texas, in an event is billed as a “non-denominational, apolitical Christian prayer meeting.” Despite the “apolitical” label, the event has some political undertones, particularly since Perry has been flirting with a run for the Republican presidential nomination and currently serves as chair of the Republican Governors Association. Perry has invited the other 49 U.S. state governors to the event. The portrayal of the event as a “nondenominational” ceremony is a misnomer, too, since the event will be exclusively Christian, and no other belief systems will be represented. Controversy surrounding Perry’s Day of Prayer is growing quickly.

Controversial Host

Controversy surrounding Perry’s Day of Prayer is growing quickly. The event is hosted and funded — including the rental of Houston’s huge stadium — by the Tupelo, Mississippi-based American Family Association (AFA), which the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) labels as an anti-gay hate group. A June 11 editorial in the Houston Chronicle opposing Perry’s Day of Prayer said “There could hardly be a more divisive, unforgiving group than the American Family Association,” to host the event. The AFA makes no attempt to hide its disdain towards gays and other members of society it considers inferior. In 2010, Bryan Fischer, AFA’s Director of Issue Analysis for Government and Public Policy, said, “Homosexuality gave us Adolph Hitler, and homosexuals in the military gave us the Brown Shirts, the Nazi war machine and six million dead Jews.” Fischer has also openly attacked native Americans. In a February, 2011 blog post (pdf), Fischer wrote that native Americans are morally and culturally inferior because of their refusal to accept Christianity. He wrote, “In all the discussions about the European settlement of the New World, one feature has been conspicuously absent: the role that the superstition, savagery and sexual immorality of native Americans played in making them morally disqualified from sovereign control of American soil.” Moreover, Fischer blamed high rates of poverty and alcoholism among native Americans on their refusal to accept Christianity, writing, ” …Many of the tribal reservations today remain mired in poverty and alcoholism because many native Americans continue to cling to the darkness of indigenous superstition instead of coming into the light of Christianity and assimilating into Christian culture.”

AFA’s president, Tim Wildmon, dismisses SPLC’s labeling of AFA as a hate group, saying AFA’s stand on homosexuality represents the beliefs of “a lot of people who have traditional values.” He adds that the purpose of the Day of Prayer is to pray for an end to the “debasement of our culture.” Translation: to pray for an end to America’s increasing acceptance of homosexuality.

Questionable Endorsers

The Rev. John Hagee, pastor of the Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas, is listed as an event endorser. He is the guy who said in a 2006 interview that Hurricane Katrina was God’s retribution against New Orelans for planning a gay pride parade. Like Harold Camping, the elderly radio pastor who gained fame in May, 2011 through his absurd failed global apocalypse PR campaign, Hagee preaches about the Rapture and the second coming of Jesus Christ. Hagee predicted on television that the world will end within 20 years. Hagee openly endorsed John McCain for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008. Another event endorser, David Barton, is a religious activist in Texas, and also a political consultant to the RNC, who says the United States is a “Christian nation” and calls the separation of church and state “a myth.” In appearances across the U.S., Barton has assured pastors that they are permitted to use their pulpit to endorse political candidates, even though doing so violates IRS rules.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – When New York became the sixth and by far the largest state to legalize same-sex marriage, following a grueling overtime session in the state Legislature Friday, it immediately transformed the national debate over the issue, legal experts said.

With a population over 19 million — more than the combined population of the five states that currently allow gay marriage, plus the District of Columbia, where it is also legal — New York is poised to provide the most complete picture yet of the legal, social and economic consequences of gay marriage.

“I think that having same-sex marriage in New York will have tremendous moral and political force for the rest of the country — in
part because New York is a large state, and in part because it hasn’t come easily,” said Suzanne Goldberg, a professor at Columbia Law School.

The New York Assembly passed same-sex marriage legislation twice before, in 2007 and 2009, but in both cases it stalled in the state Senate, as it nearly did again this week. The bill passed late Friday after legislators agreed on language allowing religious organizations to refuse to perform services or lend space for same-sex weddings.

The new law’s impact can be measured in part by the numbers at play: New York is home to more than 42,000 same-sex couples, according to an analysis of U.S. census data conducted by the Williams Institute. This means, among other things, that the number of same-sex couples living in states allowing same-sex marriage has more than doubled overnight.

Forty-two years ago, in the West Village there was a riot at a gay bar. The photographs of the event show mostly young white men, closer to the hippie kids who came to the Bleeker and MacDougal Street part of the Village than the older more professional men that one found in other bars.

Transgender folks have tried to turn this into the Compton’s Cafeteria riot which happened in 1966, but that appropriation and repurposing is too Orwellian to sustain credibility.

Given the over all tenor of the times the Stonewall Riots weren’t that big a deal. It was in the days before instant communications and by the time word got around the reaction was sort of, “Finally… Now some of the newer and more radical organizations will take the place of staid old Mattachine.”

With so much focus on the riot people are unaware of how young gay men and lesbians were integrated into the radicalism of the 1960s. I know Jim Fouratt has said some nasty things about transsexual and transgender people and so I’m not supposed to say anything respectful about him, but I actually remember him from 1967 when he was part of the radical left and involved with supporting those arrested in the Newark NJ riots as well as the Pentagon Demonstration that fall.

Stonewall is important for being famous, it served as a punctuation mark, a period ending one era and a transfer to a younger generation, the 1960s generation. Just as the Port Huron Statement by Ton Hayden in 1962 marked the end of the old left in the United States and the start of the New Left.

Organizations that had been developing in the second half of the 1960s came out from the shadow of Mattachine, rejecting suit and tie/ dress or skirt polite picketing that had represented the gay and lesbian movement earlier in the decade.

The slogan “Gay Pride” has its origins in “Black Pride”. The stand alone movement focused on gay and/or lesbian issues is similar to the feminist movement in making the personal the political.

The movements both before and after are in many ways far more important than the event, without them Stonewall would be the same as all those other riots that had happened as early as the late 1950s, early 1960s. (John Rechy recounted a riot at a doughnut shop in downtown LA circa 1960 in an article I read somewhere.)

As for me in 1969… Stonewall was pretty meaningless. I had gotten through the People’s Park riots with only one arrest. I was part of the Revolutionary Youth Movement faction of SDS and our leadership had just expelled Progressive Labor Party from SDS.

I was living 24/7 and more concerned with Weatherman and the Women’s Liberation Front because WTF? I wasn’t gay, I considered my liking certain guys to be heterosexual. No one at the Transsexual Counseling Service, on Third and Mission in SF considered themselves gay.

Why would we? While post-SRS transsexuals can be straight or lesbian, and in the case of brothers straight or gay, being transsexual per se really has nothing to do with gay or lesbian, in spite of Transgender Inc.’s efforts to graft a “T” on to Gay and Lesbian.

While Jerry and I went to a rally in Sacramento in 1970 in support of Marriage Equality of all things we did so as a straight left wing couple.

I went to my first Pride Day Parade in Hollywood, 1974. I went because friends urged me to do so and because I was starting to come out as lesbian.

And yes there were transsexual and transgender people in that parade, and at the rally another sister and I spoke about inclusiveness. She spoke mostly though about transkid issues and I spoke about unity.

Many parades later and having marched a number of times as an out and proud lesbian.

Fast forward to the present.

Stonewall 2011

It is as though the pendulum is swinging back to the left, to a more human, more decent society, one where freedom and equality are respected more than the hatred, greed and bigotry espoused by the Republican Reich.

New York State passed Marriage Equality…

I read in a New York Times article this morning that one third of the people in this country now have either marriage equality or civil unions. This means the issue of marriage equality is reaching critical mass and will soon be everywhere.

As a side note I have been reminded several times the last couple of days as to why I consider myself part of the L- Community and not the T-community. Not even a second of cheering for something that affects the lives of both- pre-op transsexual people, gay or lesbian post transsexual people and transgender people who are technically in a same sex if not same gender relationship and their right to marry.

Perhaps it is time for Transgender Inc to go its own way, too often it sounds like a straight Men’s Rights Movement dictating to gay and lesbian folks what their agenda should be. When I hear this sort of thing I am reminded that the roots of Transgender Inc. are not in the Gay or Lesbian Movements nor are they in the Transsexual Movements but rather are in the straight TV/CD movements that spawned both Tri-Ess and the IFGE.

Perhaps the problems in passing a transgender inclusive ENDA are not in the Gay and Lesbian Communities, but rather that the Borg like practice of vacuuming every possible sort of person with any sort of identity that could possibly be construed as transgender into the “Transgender as Umbrella” concept, has resulted in the inclusion of folks like the one featured in Jillian Weiss’ article.

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